Irony 101

“That’s Why I Chose Yale”

Three minutes into watching his alma mater’s new recruiting video, “That’s Why I Chose Yale,” Christopher Buckley, Class of ’75, son of the late William F., Class of ’50, paused to pour himself a “stiff one” and dashed off an e-mail to another alumnus: “OMFG!” On the screen, an actor dressed as an admissions officer had begun singing generic collegiate propaganda in bouncy rhyming couplets. (“Of course you’ll get a first-rate education, / But also thrive on classmates’ conver-sation! ”) James Goodale, Class of ’55, and a former general counsel for the Times, made it through all seventeen minutes—more collegians bursting into song, accompanied by “Up with People”-style dance numbers, and even some electric-guitar shredding in the art gallery—before reporting that the production seemed “intended for an audience that I couldn’t divine.” He added, “My God, if you’re a hockey player, you think, I’ll go to Princeton.” John Rogers, Class of ’84, and the English department’s resident Milton scholar, said, “It’s the God-damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Few institutions seem to subject themselves to there-goes-the-neighborhood-style lamentations quite as regularly as Yale, with its legions of Old Blue curmudgeons, post-structuralist radicals, and earnest young strivers. As of late last week, the video—which was produced by current students and recent graduates, under the auspices of the admissions office—had been viewed more than three hundred and fifty thousand times on the university’s YouTube channel, although it was unclear how many viewers, like Buckley, had aborted midway through, out of bafflement over authorial intent. “Halfway in, I said, ‘These people are kidding,’ ” the former Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, Class of ’56, recalled the other day. “Then I realized, ‘No, they’re not.’ And I was depressed.” IvyGate, a college blog in the Gawker mold, noted the video’s début with the headline “ ‘That’s Why I Chose’ to Ram a Soldering Iron Into My Ears.”

“It’s catering to the ‘Glee’ demographic,” the Tony Award-winning librettist Doug Wright, Class of ’85, said, referring to the high-camp Fox comedy series that sends up Disney’s “High School Musical” franchise. “It did seem a bit like Disney graduated to ‘College Musical.’ ” Reaction to the video on the Broadway circuit has ranged from “giddy delight to mortification,” Wright said, noting that “tonally, it was a little unclear whether it wanted to be true camp or if it had a dollop of sincerity.” He mentioned Yale’s “underground reputation as ‘the gay Ivy’ ”—a designation that made the cover of the university’s alumni magazine a few months ago—and said that, either way, “with this, the admissions office has all but planted a flag.”

“Yale started as a very intense, orthodox, Protestant school,” Lapham said, taking a longer view. “It felt that Harvard was falling away from the true Puritan faith. Yale would produce magistrates and preachers. That was its original purpose.” He faulted the new video not for its failed attempt at Sontagian camp but for portraying the university as a kind of summer camp for élites. “It’s a variation on Marie Antoinette in the garden of Versailles,” he said. “I’m surprised they didn’t dress the girls as shepherdesses. In the ancien régime, this is the kind of thing that would have prompted the French Revolution. Are we supposed to send this to struggling youths in Asia and Africa?”

“Milton would be absolutely and perfectly appalled by this,” Professor Rogers said. But he thought the video might be effective with kids today. “It says to a younger generation, ‘Yale is saturated in an ironic mode that your parents can’t understand,’ ” he said. “This is aristocratic and privileged irony—an aristocracy not of moneyed fathers but of generational ironic sensibility: ‘I can speak with more quotation marks around my nouns and verbs than you.’ ” Rogers, a former Whiffenpoof, granted that it was “completely possible to consider this as unintended genius”—in other words, not many quotation marks at all.

Count Dick Cavett, Class of ’58, among the enthusiasts. “It sounds sappy, but I thought it was delightful,” he said, adding, “I wonder if it really was made in America, because there are no fatties.”

“I know it seems a bit naïve, but we didn’t imagine it would get this kind of attention,” the video’s co-writer and producer, Andrew Johnson, Class of 2006, said recently. “We always viewed it as a campy and entertaining extravaganza.” For what it’s worth, neither Johnson, who works in the admissions office, nor his writing partner, and the video’s director, Ethan Kuperberg, Class of 2011, had seen “High School Musical” or “Glee” before production began. ♦

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